The COVID-19 pandemic placed new constraints and prices on commuting to work around the world. However, traditional methods of measuring household welfare (and, accordingly, poverty and inequality) based on expenditures have not considered these changes. First, we present theory showing...

Equivalence Scales are a tool for removing the heterogeneity of household sizes in the measurement of inequality, and affect poverty assessments and poverty lines. We address the disadvantage that poor households may suffer due to their reduced ability to share goods within the household. This...

We analyse the effect of varying equivalization scales and income-sharing units (households, tax-units and benefit-units) on inequality and poverty statistics using Irish microdata. We find that benchmark equivalence scales result in substantial variation in the degree of income poverty...

This paper examines measurement error in the share of income going to the top 1% (and other subgroups) that comes from estimation of the denominator. We compare two approaches. First, the default ‘external’ approach used in the current literature, which relies on different data sources for...

This paper introduces in statistics the notion of the barycenter of the distribution of a non-negative random variable Y with a positive finite mean μY and the quantile function Q(x). The barycenter is denoted by μX and defined as the expected value of the random variable X having the...

This paper introduces a theory-based equivalence scale for public in-kind transfers, which justifies comparison of distributions of extended income (cash income plus the value of public services) between European countries. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed equivalence scale in an...

The measurement of income inequality is affected by missing observations, espe- cially if they are concentrated on the tails of an income distribution. This paper conducts an experiment to test how the different correction methods proposed by the statistical, econometric and machine learning...

Bayesian estimators and highest posterior density credible intervals are obtained for two popular inequality measures, viz. the Gini index and the Bonferroni index in the case of the Dagum distribution. The study considers informative and non-informative priors, i.e. the Mukherjee-Islam prior...

This paper examines inequality in both leisure and consumption over the past four decades using time use surveys stretching from 1975 to 2016. We show that individual and family characteristics, especially when including work hours, explain most of the long run variation in leisure. We then use...

Equivalence Scales are a tool for removing the heterogeneity of household sizes in the measurement of inequality, and affect poverty assessments and poverty lines. We address the disadvantage that poor households may suffer due to their reduced ability to share goods within the household. This...

Equivalence Scales are a tool for removing the heterogeneity of household sizes in the measurement of inequality, and affect poverty assessments and poverty lines. We address the disadvantage that poor households may suffer due to their reduced ability to share goods within the household. This...

Using the Big Mac Index, we offer a simple measure to study the real income inequality. We provide a multidimensional real income inequality analysis by exploring the Coefficient of Variation and the Big Mac Affordability of households across all income deciles of 28 countries for the years 2000...

In this study we analyze the convergence of GDP per capita from 2000 to2013 (current prices and euro exchange rates) for eight countries (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) of the European Union (CEE8). Some convergence indicators are also...

In this paper, we propose to use the so-called Sen-Shorrocks poverty index (Shorrocks, 1995) to measure multidimensional deprivation when only dichotomous variables are available to assess deprivation in the various deprivation domains, the most common case in the literature, and introduce a...

This paper offers a tool box of disaggregative measures of distributional change, including population shares, income shares, quantile mean incomes and relative mean incomes of different income groups. It highlights median-based measures along with quintiles and deciles. It also offers formulas...

The main challenge in studying economic inequality is limited data availability, which is particularly problematic in developing countries. We construct a measure of economic inequality for 234 countries/territories from 1992 to 2013 using satellite data on night lights and gridded population...

In this study we analyze the convergence of GDP per capita from 2000 to2013 (current prices and euro exchange rates) for eight countries (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) of the European Union (CEE8). Some convergence indicators are also...

Inflationssorgen sind zunehmend wieder ein Thema in der Öffentlichkeit. Nach einer ausgedehnten Phase der Niedriginflation sind die Inflationsraten nun, teils auch durch gleichzeitig auftretende Sondereffekte, wieder angestiegen. Dies wirft vor allem Fragen danach auf, welche gesellschaftlichen...

The key challenge in making distributional comparisons with ordinal data is the lack of commensurability of the distances between the ordered categories. This chapter provides a critical review of the most recent theoretical developments addressing this challenge and providing methods for...

We study the dynamics of income inequality, capital concentration, and voting outcomes before 1914. Based on new panel data for Prussian counties and districts we re-evaluate the key economic debate between Marxists and their critics before 1914. We show that the increase in inequality was...

This paper considers data quality issues for the analysis of consumption inequality exploiting two complementary datasets from the Consumer Expenditure Survey for the United States. The Interview sample follows survey households over four calendar quarters and consists of retrospectively...

A basic tenet of economic science is that productivity growth is the source of growth in real income per capita. But our results raise doubts by creating a direct link between macro productivity growth and the micro evolution of the income distribution. We show that over the entire period...

Predictable polarization is everywhere. We can often predict the different directions that people’s opinions—including our own—will shift over time. Empirical studies suggest that this is so whenever evidence is ambiguous, a fact that’s often thought to demonstrate human bias or...

In this paper, we propose a new measure of horizontal equity that overcomes many of the shortcomings of previous proposed measures. Our starting point is the observation that a well-behaved social welfare function need not evaluate global' (vertical equity) differences in after-tax income using...